<p>A little over two months after their initial launch of Titanium, Appcelerator today followed with the “PR2″ release of their open-source web-as-desktop-app run-time platform (i.e., an open-source competitor to Adobe AIR).

This release adds support for Linux to their OS X and Windows versions and also provides a GUI for creating stand-alone Titanium apps (the previous version relied on command-line utilities). This application is a Titanium app itself and includes some innovative features, including a view of the Titanium group’s Twitter / FriendFeed streams and a direct connection to their IRC channel.

Appcelerator is also trying to make it as easy as possible hack away on the Titanium platform without requiring the use of C++; they’ve added a new module API that lets you use JavaScript, Ruby or Python in addition to Bjarne Stroustrup‘s spawn.

On a lower level, and of more probable interest to our community, the JavaScript APIs have been greatly extended. Let’s consider the File API in the first release of Titanium, which consisted of one documented method (“read”) and one undocumented method (“write”). In the PR2 release, it looks quite a bit richer:

Yes congrats on the release and I’ll second the comment about being happy to also see the Linux version.

I really liked the ‘idea’ of Adobe AIR, but as soon as I saw that the company that brought us SVG had removed SVG from AIR, I realised this is not the type of company I want to invest any of my time in. I have a very low tolerance for such corporate bullshit, never knowing what stunt they will try and pull next.

Needless to say I’m very happy to see an open source contender shaping up so nicely!